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The Other Odd Couple

There was an undercurrent of rivalry to the friendship between Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein

By

Richard B. Woodward

Updated Dec. 3, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim deserve a dual biography. Arguably the two most innovative figures of postwar American musical theater, they knew each other from 1955, when the unknown Mr. Sondheim was hired to write lyrics for "West Side Story," until Mr. Bernstein's death in 1990. While whoever assumes the task should have plenty of material to ponder, only a skilled interpreter of musical scores and egos will be able to chart the transit of influences and the course of a friendship that had elements of a master-pupil rivalry.

This fall a couple of artifacts came into public view that future scholars might want to study closely. Exhibit A was the New York premiere of Mr. Bernstein's opera "A Quiet Place." Derided by American critics on its debut in 1983 at the Houston Grand Opera, it did not have another production in this country until the New York City Opera's staging this fall, when the reception was generally kinder.

Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein, around 1965.
Stephen Sondheim

Begun after the 1978 death of Mr. Bernstein's wife, whom he had left a year earlier to pursue an affair with a man, "A Quiet Place" is akin to watching someone have a nervous breakdown on stage. The setting is a funeral for the alcoholic mother of a New England family. The main character is her psychotic son, Junior. A draft dodger with incestuous feelings for his sister and a homosexual attachment to her husband, Junior seems most tormented by a sense of having failed his father, a successful businessman. Conflicts are magnified by music wavering between homey tonality and atonal chaos.

There is no mention of "A Quiet Place" in Mr. Sondheim's opinionated and self-critical new book, "Finishing the Hat" (Knopf)—exhibit B for musical-theater historians. But in passages about Mr. Bernstein, the 80-year old mingles a tone of respect and affection with less flattering judgments about his former musical partner.

Mr. Bernstein was not yet 30 when he achieved his first renown as a composer of Broadway musicals. Mr. Sondheim recalls that the offbeat phrases and time signatures of "On the Town" (on Broadway from 1944-46 and then a movie in 1949) "exploded" on him when he was a teenager and learning to write shows from his Westchester, N.Y., neighbor, the old-school Oscar Hammerstein II. "From Lenny I learned to approach theater music more freely and less squarely," writes Mr. Sondheim.

From the start of their friendship, though, he claims to have been less enamored of Mr. Bernstein's taste for "poetic" lyrics. His reservations about their work on "West Side Story" have appeared in several interviews recently. In "Finishing the Hat," he says that even at their first 1955 meeting, when the 23-year-old was trying out for the already established composer, Mr. Sondheim kept under wraps examples of his "early overripe" romantic songs, "which I suspect Lenny would have loved."

Mr. Sondheim calls their collaboration "a delight in every way except for the lyrical result." He expresses shame that his youthful insecurity prevented him from vetoing purplish diction and images that ended up in the show because Mr. Bernstein insisted on them. The lyricist is particularly chagrined that "street kids of the pavements of New York City" should have ended up crooning lines such as "Today the world was just an address" from "Tonight." As he says, "Lenny kept encouraging me to come up with these maunderings."

Another regret is that "West Side Story" stereotyped Mr. Sondheim as a lyricist, even though he had been writing entire shows since prep school. As he says in "Finishing the Hat," when his music "finally popped into the open" with "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in 1962, "I was dismissed as an overly ambitious pretender who should stick to his own side of the street. (The label has persisted to this day, though with less intensity.)"

After "West Side Story," the careers of the two men diverged more than they intersected. For Mr. Bernstein, nothing less than universal adoration and mastery of all musical genres would do. A world-class pianist and conductor, he also became a television pioneer, teaching mass audiences about Stravinsky and Hindemith. Without ever shunning the popular theater, he spent much of his last 30 years seeking recognition as a "serious" composer of classical music.

The more guarded Mr. Sondheim chose instead to remap the frontiers of Times Square, at times gently and more often boldly pushing them outward. He calls himself a "conservative" in honoring the discipline of rhyme schemes and other constraints. "Consistency may seem like a stodgy substitute for imagination, but it is frequently the basis for satisfaction in art, especially in small forms like song lyrics," he writes.

His exacting temperament would never allow him to write something like Mr. Bernstein's "A Quiet Place," with its mood swings and blatant sentimentality. Then again, the brashness and sensuality in Mr. Bernstein's scores are hard to find in Mr. Sondheim's oeuvre. "West Side Story" rides on the hot, slinky rhythms of Latin jazz, whereas "A Little Night Music" is an ingenious set of variations on the waltz.

In his program notes for "A Quiet Place," the opera's librettist, Stephen Wadsworth, writes that during their 1980-83 collaboration, he and Mr. Bernstein wanted to try something unprecedented and drew on a grab-bag of role models, from Lorenzo Da Ponte to Leoš Janáček. "Rhyme schemes, meter schemes, closed forms, 'well-made play' schemes were viewed suspiciously and only grudgingly allowed."

It would be interesting to know if Mr. Bernstein saw "Sweeney Todd" during its 1979-80 Broadway run. If he had, he surely would have recognized that his former protégé had written a masterpiece to rival his own earlier "Candide"—only in this case Mr. Sondheim had done both the music and the words. Would "Sweeney Todd" have invigorated or depressed the aging composer as he struggled with "A Quiet Place"?

That Mr. Bernstein was spreading himself too thin was a standard gripe by the time it was echoed by Mr. Sondheim in his new lyrics to the Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin ballad "Saga of Jenny" for a Tanglewood event celebrating the maestro's 70th birthday in 1988. "Saga of Lenny" is about a man who "couldn't make up his mind" and includes the barbed lines "Poor Lenny / Ten gifts too many…"

Mr. Sondheim still sounds ambivalent about his friend. In "Finishing the Hat," he claims that the "largest lesson" he learned from their relationship was "the one I took from both his art and his life: namely, that the only chances worth taking are big ones. All of the mistakes he made, if indeed they were mistakes, were huge—he never fell off the lowest rung of the ladder."

Despite this expression of bravado, Mr. Sondheim doesn't take big emotional chances in his autobiography. The mistakes he admits to seem trivial and work-related. Instead of revelations from private life, we are treated to a master class on the craft of writing for the musical theater, taught by the wisest professor on the faculty (and the hardest grader). Oddly, for someone who dislikes being typecast as a lyricist, his book doesn't subject the music composed by himself and others to the same rigorous analysis he gives to words. Perhaps, he is saving that expert commentary for the second volume, scheduled for release next year.